07.10.11

Summary: Likewise and Centrify carry on promoting Active Directory just like Mono promotes C# and other inferior (not to mention risky) ways of doing things

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” stresses a famous saying. To Microsoft, however, it’s more than just flattering and also an endorsement of the One Microsoft Way. To Microsoft it is additionally a chance to discriminate and even file lawsuits. Short of a lawsuit, Microsoft can tax/extort rivals. This whole paradigm of imitating Microsoft is truly a problem. Not only Mono is beneficial to Microsoft. Anything which promotes development and deployment with Microsoft APIs is likely to make Microsoft stronger. One such example is the work of former Microsoft people who take Samba too far and add patents to it. We are talking about Likewise, which according to this new announcement has just sold AD Bridge. Another company which does something similar is Centrify [1, 2], and it too has an announcement about AD. They help spread Microsoft, which ultimately leads to FOSS or Novell replaced being by Microsoft, as in this new case (not necessarily a shift through APIs). People must understand that Wine or Samba are not the same things because they are more like compatibility shims, whereas Mono for example encourages the creation of yet more dependence on Microsoft APIs. This point was stressed as the #1 issue with Mono when I did that recent video. █

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The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again